hairs where he lies at night. The image of the god is in the grey riven willow that leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture of old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare chalk hollow where the dead thistles stick out through a yard of snow and give strange thoughts of the sailless beautiful sea that once rippled over the Downs: one also in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at the first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. There is one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, such as that between two roads that go almost parallel for a while--a long steep piece, only a few feet broad, impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and blackberry, but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. One, too, perhaps many, were abroad one August night on a high hillside when the hedge crickets sang high up in the dogwood and clematis like small but deafening sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, and the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence under the full moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer of the wood, where tree and shadow were equals, I walked on a grating of shadows with lights between as if from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light happiness through which I passed an unwilling but unfeared intruder. In places these gods preside over some harmony of the earth with the works of men. There is one such upon the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join it, after passing the dark boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry orchards, grass full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in groups and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the Medway. Just at the approach there is a two-storied farm with dormers in the darkly mellowed roof, protected by sycamores and chestnuts, and before it a weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but not at right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other outbuildings of old brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint and thatch beside a pond, at the edge of a broad unhedged field where random oaks shadow the grass. Behind runs the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that line of white beam and yew, with here and there an ash up which the stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, for they seem of the same material as the tree, and both of stone. Under the yew and white beam the clematis clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows up to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of orchard is a-froth round farmhouses or islands of oak; and east and west sweeps the crescent of the North Downs.